What We’re Thinking

Since Park Piedmont Advisors’ founding in 2003, we’ve been writing a series of Monthly Comments and sharing them with our clients and friends. These original writings cover a wide array of financial topics, as well as our thoughts on the bubbles, booms, busts, and bailouts we’ve guided our clients through.

We are delighted to share these Monthly Comments with you – to illustrate how we believe in thinking for ourselves, not following the herd. For example: to read what we were thinking in the depths of the financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009, click here and here.

We’ll also be posting new content regularly on this site. We’ve organized our thinking and writing into two categories: Financial Life 101 (for people just starting to learn about these topics), and Financial Life 201 (for those with a familiarity with this material).

For decades, Wall Street firms have marketed their ability to beat the market with their active investing strategies. The claim hinged on each firm’s ability to “pick winners,” stocks whose returns would beat the market’s. This market-beating ability would, in turn, justify the firms’ high fees.

But in fact, active management rarely provides better investment results than what could be earned simply by owning and holding broad market indexes. A recent “Your Money” column by the New York Times’ Jeff Sommer (“How Many Mutual Funds Routinely Rout the Market? Zero,” March 15, 2015) cites a substantial body of research showing that, over the past five years, not a single actively managed mutual fund has “actually managed to outperform the rising market.”

Sommer’s column discussed recent research that looked at the following: Starting with 2,862 actively managed domestic stock mutual funds in operation through the 12-month period between April 2009-March 2010, the study selected the top quartile of funds for those 12 months, then analyzed which of those funds continued in the top quarter for each of the next four 12-month periods through March 2014.

The answer: two. Out of the total pool of 2,862, only two – less than 1/1000 of the total pool – had consistently beaten the market. Keep in mind: all of these funds are run by smart, sophisticated investment professionals, yet they could not keep pace with market returns. Sommer notes that the two funds that had done well for the four years through March 2014 have since experienced “a mediocre stretch, at best.”

In Sommer’s concluding words: “The study seems to support the considerable body of evidence suggesting that most people should not even try to beat the market: Just pick low-cost index funds, assemble a balanced and appropriate portfolio for your specific needs, and give up on active fund management.”

This customized allocation approach, using low-cost indexed investments, has been PPA’s consistent strategy since its founding in 2003. Sommer’s column can be read in its entirety here:

We’ve never believed that “actively managed” investments can reliably outperform index funds over longer-term timeframes. (NOTE: when we use the term index funds, we mean mutual funds and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).) Turns out, the evidence is on our side: over the past decade, the vast majority of actively managed funds – large-cap, mid-cap, and small-cap alike – underperformed their benchmark indices (source: S&P Dow Jones Indices, SPIVA 2014 Year-End Scorecard). See also Prof. Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street: the Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing; John Bogle, Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor.

Given actively managed funds’ underperformance, why do they cost so much? Interestingly, it is those extra costs associated with active management that end up being the main reason for their long term underperformance when compared to a benchmark index, which is one of Bogle’s main points.

Some of the extra cost goes for research, the goal of which is to pick stocks that will do better than the aggregate investment result of the stocks in the benchmark index. Then there are the trading costs that arise when stocks are bought and sold by the fund managers. Taxes on gains also add to the cost of owning the fund. Some funds add their own distribution costs to the fund, paid by the investors. And sometimes there are sales commissions, referred to as “loads,” paid to brokers for selling the funds, which would add another cost.

By comparison, the investor in an index fund pays a very low fee to the fund, which does no research, has few trading costs and few taxable distributions, adds no distribution costs, and has no loads. The index fund invests in all the stocks that meet the definition of the index the fund has developed (e.g., various emerging market indices), or invests in an existing index the result of which the fund is designed to match (e.g., the S&P 500 index). There is no picking and choosing of certain stocks to the exclusion of others, within the universe of stocks in the index.

Over time, many in the investment community have come to realize that all the smart people, and sophisticated strategies, trying to pick the outperformers adds up to an exercise in futility. We think the better approach is to buy all the stocks in the various sectors of the markets that you are interested in, using low-cost index funds, and then let the aggregate result of those sectors be your result, absent the unnecessary, and, over time, self-defeating costs.

Make no mistake: money is extremely important in our lives and our world: it shapes our behavior, often drives our decision-making, and colors the way we think and speak. But money, at core, is just a tool. We don’t earn money for money’s sake. We do it to have a home, support the educational pursuits of our children and grandchildren, retire comfortably, see the world, invest in our community. Money, at core, is a vehicle to express our deeply held values, goals, and priorities. The purpose of our financial advisory work is always to achieve something more than money.

At Park Piedmont Advisors, a big part of the work we do is to help our clients envision and plan for their future. We understand that, for virtually everyone, the future is full of both promise and uncertainty. And the timeframe for measuring success is long.